Scalia, the Court, and the Last Straw

The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is far more important politically than most commentators have perceived. It opens the door to an action that could break up the country.At present, the Court has a four-vote block of hard-line cultural Marxists. When Scalia was alive, that block was balanced by four other Justices who were moderately to very conservative. The Chief Justice mediated between the two blocks, sometimes voting with one, sometimes the other, but almost always voting in favor of moderation.With Scalia gone, the Left can prevail but the Right cannot. Even if the Chief Justice votes with the conservatives, they fail on a tie. If he votes with the Left, they win.If Hillary Clinton is the next president, Scalia's seat will undoubtedly be filled by someone who votes with the Left. The Republican Senate will not have the guts to leave the seat open for four years--four years in which, again, the Left can win but the Right cannot. The same outcome is possible with a Republican in the White House: both Earl Warren and Souter were Republican picks.Should the Left get a five-vote block, the Supreme Court will become a "Revolutionary Tribunal" which will stop at nothing to force cultural Marxism down the throat of the rest of the country. It is easy to think of issues where that would be disastrous. Outlawing home schooling comes to mind. But there is one issue where a ruling by the Court could destroy the American state itself. That issue is "reparations".One of the top causes for American cultural Marxists is paying every American black a large sum of tax money as reparations for slavery. The notion is absurd. Those blacks were first enslaved in Africa, by Arabs or other blacks. Those who were sent to the American South were lucky compared to others who were sold to places like Haiti, where one-third of the black population was worked to death annually. Black Americans today benefit greatly from the fact that their ancestors were sent here rather than remaining in west Africa, which is one of the worst hellholes on Earth.Life in west Africa, most of it anyway, is so bad I am willing to make a bet. If someone sailed the replica of the Amistad, a slave ship, to almost any west African port and asked for volunteers to go to America, chained up just like their ancestors, and be sold as slaves once they got there, the line to get on board would be miles long. The draw of leaving Africa and getting to America would be so strong people would agree to anything in order to do it.As I have noted before in my columns, the whole slavery issue is cant. There are very few people on Earth who did not have slaves among their ancestors. In almost all the world throughout almost all of history, if you were captured in war, your alternatives were slavery or death. Most captives presumably preferred slavery.Before the Civil War, the South had black slave owners as well as white. The 1830 census shows about 1,700 black slave owners, who owned between them about 7,500 other blacks. In Louisiana, you could find black plantation owners who had black overseers over their black slaves. When the war broke out, those black plantation owners equipped a company of Confederate infantry as their contribution to the war effort. A non-trivial number of blacks fought for the Confederacy. Are all those blacks' descendants to get reparations for slavery?The whole notion of reparations is so absurd only cultural Marxists could believe in it. But it would not be difficult for someone to craft a case demanding reparations that would wend its way to a hard-Left Supreme Court. How would the rest of the country react to a ruling that said we must double the income tax to pay for, say, $10 trillion in reparations?If would rebel. That would be the final straw where Americans who are not black would say, "This isn't my country anymore." The rebellion would probably start with a Constitutional crisis as Congress refused to vote both the funds and the taxes. If the Court, and, perhaps, a sympathetic White House found a way around Congress, you would see the rise of a serious secession movement. Donald Trump's poll numbers show a good third of Americans might want out, with solid majorities in some states. Who would go first, South Carolina or Idaho?The rest of America will not pay reparations to blacks. Are the Chinese to get reparations for laws that tried to keep them out? Are the Irish to get reparations from Britain for the potato famine? Am I to get reparations for the killing of Hannah Dustin's baby by the Indians on the Massachusetts frontier in the 1690s (I am a Dustin descendant)? Are dogs to be given reparations for being tied up?These arguments would count for nothing to a Supreme Court with a five-vote culturally Marxist block. All that matters to ideologues is their ideology. If their actions caused the country to break up, well, what would that be to them? That's someone else's problem.But that is what is at stake in the fight to fill Justice Scalia's seat on the court. And avoiding hard-Left judicial dictatorship depends on the very weak reed that is the Republican Party.